Snap-Check-Ins
Check in with a student. Snap their work. Check in again before the period ends.
A teacher checking in with students during independent practice already knows more about their class than any report will ever tell them. What they have never had is a way to keep it. A Check-In keeps it, during the brief time a teacher has with each student.
First visit
Check in first. The camera comes second.
Check in with a student during independent practice. The first words to say are at the top of the check-in: “Hi Trent, what’s your learning goal today?” Then snap the work in front of them, on paper or on their screen. Say their name and Teacher Supreme knows whose work it is.
What to say next
Three moves, in order.
Teacher Supreme reads the answers, shows how many are right, and gives you three moves in order: Try first, Say next, Go deeper. In math and science, when a wrong answer matches a well-known mix-up, it names that mix-up and gives you the words to reteach it. When it is not sure of an answer, it tells you to check that one yourself instead of guessing.
Second visit
Check in again before the period ends.
Check in with that same student a second time and snap their work again. Now there is something no single snap can show: what the student finished between your two visits, which answers they corrected, and the one skill worth going back to. Two visits are not twice the information — they are a different kind of information.
The whole room
See every student at once.
Under the check-in, every student in the class shows one of five marks: needs you, check in, not seen yet, working, or ready for more, with the minutes since you last checked in. Tap a student and that check-in opens; press and hold to see everything saved for that student this class. When two or more students miss the same question or share the same mix-up, Teacher Supreme names it during the period, while you can still reteach it.
What the teacher keeps
The scoring is the computer’s. The judgement is yours.
Teacher Supreme reads and scores multiple choice, true-or-false and fill-in questions. Written answers are shown to the teacher, because that is where a teacher’s judgement is worth the most and where an automatic grader does the most damage. Nothing reaches a gradebook until the teacher sends it.
What a family hears
A progress note, written from what the teacher already saw.
Every sentence in a parent note is a number the teacher saw on the screen or the skill Teacher Supreme named: questions answered, questions correct, what was corrected between visits, what to practice. It says plainly that it is a progress snapshot and not a final grade. A photograph shows the work, not the effort behind it, so the note stays with what the work shows. If you just ran a Snap-Check-In, the note home opens with it.
Where the method comes from
Sampling a classroom at intervals — rather than watching every student continuously — is an established way to see what students are actually doing. Researchers built observation systems on it decades ago and used them in real schools; what they needed was a trained observer with a clipboard, which is why it never became something an ordinary teacher could do on a Tuesday.
A Check-In is that method with a camera and a class roster. The evidence for the method is long settled. What was missing was a way to run it during the brief time a teacher can give one student.
Teacher Supreme is new, and no classroom study of it exists yet. This page describes what it does, not what it causes. When there is a study, what it found will be here — with its date and its numbers.
Or read the coaching library — what every indicator gives a teacher, with one example card.